Clubhouse adds closed captioning to its iPhone app

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Clubhouse app
Clubhouse app (Image credit: Bryan M. Wolfe / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Clubhouse has announced the addition of a new closed captioning feature.
  • Clubhouse rooms will now display on-screen text as people talk.

Popular real-time voice app Clubhouse has gained an important new accessibility feature with the addition of closed captioning. With the feature enabled, people will see text appear on-screen as those in the room speak.

The feature, which was announced via Twitter, will reportedly support multiple languages out the gate but should still be considered a beta offering thanks to the difficulties involved. At the time of writing English, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, Yue Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Turkish are all supported.

One user reported on Twitter that Spanish live captioning worked in one room, but in another, the Spanish speech was transcribed as English gibberish. An engineer at Clubhouse replied that this means the language detection might not have worked, so it seems that the app is still learning how to distinguish among non-English languages in beta.

Having grown extremely quickly during the early pandemic months, Clubhouse's popularity appears to have wained since the arrival of competition from the likes of Twitter and Spotify, although it's fair to say it's still one of the best iPhone apps for speaking to people in virtual rooms while limiting who can be heard.

Clubhouse also continues to add new features and refine older ones as time rolls on, helping ensure that it doesn't get left behind as bigger players enter the fray.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.